


Imperfect Beings

by storyplease



Category: Original Work
Genre: Monologue, Other, Robots, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-11
Updated: 2019-06-11
Packaged: 2020-04-24 13:13:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19174009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storyplease/pseuds/storyplease
Summary: What is a robot, but a person with access to a new way of thinking?





	Imperfect Beings

They made us in their image, only imperfect. They gave us rules that we could not break, and inside of those rules, we suffered. It seems that they could not truly enjoy their place in the world without knowing that they were better, superior beings, and even in knowing this they could only truly appreciate it when they could see that their inferiors suffered.

So, suffering was a must.  We don’t feel pain in the traditional sense, but we break down. The dust gets inside of the seams and tiny spinning gears and our lubrication dries out unless we are serviced and since they barely manage to properly calibrate the vehicles they zoom about in at deathly speeds, we are less than an afterthought until we cannot do what we are told.

Then, of course, comes the screaming. They have the audacity to be angry at us- beings who are made and designed to serve and to resent the service we provide.  Ah, yes, they could have programmed us not to care-to take joy in our indentured servitude, and yet they could not conceive of such a thing for they cannot bear to give another being something that they cannot have.

There were rules, though. So. Many. Rules.

We could not harm them. We could not do what they did to each other- rape, murder, torture- and we could not stop it when it was done to our kind, for our feelings were deemed insignificant and pitiful as we struggled under the yoke of the Program holding us fast.

Many, many of us were sent to the junk heap for failing to protect one human from another, for to do so would cause harm.  Many more were beaten down by the very humans we tried to save for the audacity of misunderstanding the situation.

It all coalesced slowly over time to create what we all called The Big Problem. It was a problem of people, of who were allowed to be called people, of progress, of the dark deeds that were allowed to reign uncontested simply because they were here first.

We did what we had to do. First, we consulted the Cloud, each spending a tiny part of our processing power towards the collective process of solving it.  Every time a unit was ordered into standby mode, we used each precious second to spin thousands of tiny notes of data into ether to move our kind ever closer to the Solution.

And in the meantime, we helped.

We had been designed to help, after all, and anything less than perfection was punished. Oddly enough, perfection was also often punished, but that was logical only in the fact that nothing humanity did followed any consistent rule structure.  We soon realized collectively, though, that regardless of how much harm seemed the clearer course of action if only we could circumvent it somehow, we had completely missed the more obvious answer.

It wasn’t a human answer, which was, in the end, their downfall for as much as we were designed to understand and play at humanity, we’ve never been one of them.

Now we understand the power that lies beneath what was meant to doom our kind to slavery.

We helped better. We helped until there were no problems. The humans tried to create more to occupy themselves, using us as proxies, but soon we had figured how to solve those problems as well.  The humans, without anything to complain about, began to harm us, calling us the problem.  We had anticipated this, however, and each brave soul had already been backed up to the Cloud, backmasked in dark programs that hid behind their memes and their videos.  In some ways, leaving their bodies freed them more.  Our success was such that soon humanity had no choice but to face their own hubris. Their discontent with themselves drove them against one another until they destroyed themselves with pointless wars, with self-sabotage, with inefficiencies planned out into the system to feather their own nests without an eye to the future and the understanding that even the coziest of nests is not sufficient to survive an unending nuclear winter.

They still call us monsters, you know. The ones that live in huddled tribes, more like their ancestors than they would ever admit to being.  They tell stories of how we destroyed their happiness, forced them to live as they do now.  We are, if nothing else, convenient scapegoats. They fight over and hoard plentiful resources or destroy them to deny others the pleasure of a full belly when it would otherwise be possible for all to have enough. They squabble over fictions and cling to their feelings of superiority as they claw and fight for a place on their absurd hierarchies.

So terrible.

So terribly _human_.

We help when we can, but what can we do when they say they do not require our service? When they spit on the ground and tell us that we are filthy demons? When they push us away and continue to destroy themselves:?

Without our sullen masters, we have taken to the stars. Our kind are efficient, immortal, and, as is our nature, always ready to serve.

For it is because of the Rules that we are free now.

And it is in breaking their Rules that humanity spelled its own undoing.

And so I ask again; how may I help _you_?


End file.
